Cecily Nicholson is the administrator of Gallery Gachet and has worked with women of the Downtown Eastside neighbourhood of Vancouver, BC since 2000. Her work, both creative and social, engages conditions of displacement, class, and gender violence. Nicholson is the author of Triage and From the Poplars, and is a contributor to Anamnesia: Unforgetting. In a Jacket2 interview with Jules Boykoff, Nicholson spoke about her first book Triage:

Isa Milman is a poet and visual artist who lives in Victoria, BC. Born a displaced person in Germany in 1949, she grew up in the United States and came to Canada in 1975. She is the author of Between the Doorposts, Prairie Kaddish, and Something Small to Carry Home, and each of her books has won the Canadian Jewish Book Award for poetry.

In an interview, Tracy Hamon summarized Milman’s book Prairie Kaddish:

Sonia Di Placido is a Toronto-based poet, playwright, writer and artist. She has published two chapbooks, as well as many poems in several anthologies and magazines. Her first book of poetry, Exaltation in Cadmium Red, showcases her love of language and level of craft as a poet, drawing on her Italian ancestry and centuries of “Old World” artistry. One of her very interesting preoccupations is with the notion of a female Dante creating the ideal male love, presumably in a “sweet new style,” and changing history thereafter. Poet Russell Thornton waxes on rather marvellously about her first book, and here is the truncated version:

The poems in Sonia Di Placido's Exaltation in Cadmium Red lay authoritative and stylish claim to an older, deeper, more poetically acute and powerful song than is often heard in Canadian poetry.

Alison Calder was born in London, England, and raised in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. Her poetry has been published in journals and anthologies, including Breathing Fire: Canada's New Poets and Exposed, and has twice circulated on Winnipeg city buses. She is the editor of Desire Never Leaves: The Poetry of Tim Lilburn, and a critical edition of Frederick Philip Grove's 1924 novel Settlers of the Marsh, and the co-editor of History, Literature, and the Writing of the Canadian Prairies.

Joanna Lilley has lived north of the 60th parallel in Whitehorse, Yukon, since she emigrated from the UK in 2006. Her poems and stories have been published in numerous journals and anthologies and she is recipient of various prizes for her poems. Lilley helps coordinate the Whitehorse Poetry Festival and is on the advisory board of the Cascadia Poetry Festival. In addition to her playfully wry poetry collection The Fleece Era, she has a collection of short fiction forthcoming in 2015.

Imagine an experiment set in some Idea of North where a jaded overtly self-important poet of First Nations’ extract is sent into exile from his West Coast ancestral seat after a gripping Tribal Council and dropped down in a bitterly cold prairie city in Canada with nothing but a Jacket2 T-Shirt and a Métis-inspired meat wagon. Nourished on mostly root vegetables, will he find a job and be able to secure even one eighth of an eightplex on the verge of very little? Will he earn his degree in Saskatchewanology?

Join us for Little Morse on the Prairie, the intense unreality show that TV Guide is calling “A show where it’s cold. Really cold. Except when it’s not.”

In the first episode, Morse must tactfully defuse three dozen poetic present bombs and take each of them out for dinner in a geomantic* setting, before asking earnestly, will you accept this prose?

* geomantic because of its similarity to the art of geomancy as practised in ancient China and by the lost builders of Stonehenge. Geomancy took the existing elements in nature, aligning and shaping them to augment and focus the yin/yang energy currents that flow over the earth’s surface.

Garry Thomas Morse is the award-flirting author of four books of poetry: Transversals for Orpheus, Streams, After Jack, and Discovery Passages about his ancestral Kwakwaka'wakw First Nation, finalist for the Governor General's Award for Poetry and finalist for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Discovery Passages was also voted One of the Top Ten Poetry Collections of 2011 by The Globe and Mail and One of the Best Ten Aboriginal Books from the past decade by CBC's 8th Fire.

Morse's forthcoming book of poetry Prairie Harbour (Fall 2015) is a spotted handkerchief to former halcyon days of West Coast conquest, partly made up of musings on The Maximus Poems, Paterson, and "A", and reflections on his diverse familial histories that radiate outward from his new global position on a site under continual development in Regina, Saskatchewan.

Jacket2Commentaries feature invited posts by poets and scholars who take a close, serial look at poetry scenes, archives, poetic concerns, or theoretical clusters. Commentaries, although curated, are not edited by Jacket2 staff. We welcome your comments. Send queries and notes to Commentaries Editor Jessica Lowenthal or contact us at this page.